Accelerationism and Positive Thinking after Beijing Realism
8 April, 2025
Tami Xiang, Lucky 88, (2019), Beijing Realism Exhibition. Image by Goolugatup Heathcote.
In Jia Zhangke’s Platform (2000), a film about the impact of Opening and Reform on rural China, the elderly generation cannot comprehend the aspirations of young people to listen to pop music, wear flared jeans and work in the arts. The older generation appear to have been frozen in time by the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and cannot see the opportunities presented by Western culture. One generation later, after accelerated industrial, technological and social development, change has become an accepted part of Chinese life. The responses of the Australian-Chinese community to Beijing Realism, a 2023 exhibition curated by the authors, offer something of a picture of this confrontation between generations. Today’s Chinese people are no longer resisting change, but have normalised change as a part of China’s accelerated pace of economic, industrial and technological development.
It is something of a truism to say that contemporary China has become an authoritarian state, and that industrial and technological development is part of the way this state maintains itself in power. Chinese people have been encouraged to adopt an affirmative attitude toward the government and its policies, as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) takes credit for steering the country out of the material poverty of the Cultural Revolution. We should also remember that the CCP maintained its power even when it was not driving economic development, and instead oversaw famines and a civil war during the 1950s and 1960s. As China’s economy slumps today, Xi Jinping is more in control of the country than any president has been since Mao. The relationship between economic success and government support is not correlated in the same way in China as it is in Western democracies, where people vote for leaders who are thought to have a better chance of improving the country’s opportunities to create wealth.
It is in this context that I want to return to the reception of Beijing Realism, documented by the Australian arts publication Arts Hub and then in the pages of Dispatch.[i] Jo Pickup and Celina Lei’s criticisms of Beijing Realism in Arts Hub can be put into the context of Xi’s presidency of China, and of a culture war taking place between China and the West (as one Chinese person pointed out to me, even the name ‘Beijing’ is sensitive in this context). They can also be more simply contextualised in terms of a generational view of China that has conflated its national identity with accelerated industrial and technological development. While the culture war is a more political way of interpreting the offense that Beijing Realism created among its audiences, the idea of China as an advanced and advancing economy has been naturalised by those who lived through Opening and Reform, experiencing first-hand the economic growth it sparked. While the Arts Hub critique was generated by ‘[a] group of Chinese students’, this view of a positive China is shared by an older generation who lived through Opening and Reform.[ii] Interviewing a group of older Chinese women from the Australian-Chinese community about Beijing Realism, we found they shared this sense of offense the show created in its critical representations of the country.
It is worth revisiting the works from the exhibition briefly to contextualise these responses. Photography and video works by Han Bing, Hu Xiangqian, Li Xiaofei and Tami Xiang (also curator and co-author of this paper) featured representations of workers, pensioners and schoolchildren in contemporary China, posing on building sites (Han), working in factories (Li), dancing in a city square (Hu) and posing with items purchased from the shop (Xiang). Together these works built a picture of an underclass who have fallen into the cracks of the accelerated development of China, those who spend their lives on building sites and in factories, and who have not achieved the wealth that is so visible in the country’s hyperdeveloped cities. Pictures and videos featuring factory workers and peasants emphasise those left behind by the increasing prosperity of the middle classes.
Li Xiaofei, My Locker + Sisters Still, (2018), Beijing Realism Exhibition. Image by Goolugatup Heathcote.
The first signs we had that there was some pushback against the exhibition was during its opening night, when amidst the crowds of Chinese-Australian and non-Chinese people a woman explained to one of us that Li Xiaofei’s Chongming Island (2015) was not a realistic picture of factory work in Shanghai. Chongming Island is from Li’s ongoing Assembly Line project that documents factory work across China, and the island of the show’s title is in Shanghai. The exhibition visitor explained that there were no longer factories like that in Shanghai because industry had moved elsewhere, presumably to places like Shenzhen where labour is less regulated. This dispute over the accuracy of representations of Chinese factories is of interest not because of its fidelity to the real circumstances of their workers, but because of the emphasis upon the speed with which the country is developing. The movement of factories away from Shanghai has, in this visitor’s view, taken only the few years that separate the work from its exhibition in Australia, from 2015 when the work was made to its exhibition in 2023. There is also sense of what Xi has emphasised as ‘positive thinking’ here, the responsibility of Chinese people to be supportive of the country and its image.
Later, when we met an older group of Chinese women, they too were interested in correcting the negative images of China that they found within the exhibition. ‘Now China is actually very good,’ one older woman told us, ‘good food, good buildings, good everything, everything is very nice, trains and hotels.’ She also emphasised the pace of change, complaining that the show was about history, rather than contemporary China. ‘China has astronauts now,’ she said, complaining that she felt discriminated against by the exhibition. ‘Every day China changes,’ another agreed, speaking as part of the group of older women we interviewed.
Pointing to Han Bing’s pictures of people building a house with bricks, a fourth woman from this group said that she too built her house with her own hands, but that Chinese people have come a long way in a short time. Factory conditions have improved, workers are more canny about where they work and what they are paid, and there are no longer bicycle pulled tuk tuks to take you where you want to go. Instead people use the Chinese version of Uber and ride their own motorbikes. Seeing Xiang’s pictures of pensioners in the exhibition, she says that she was effectively seeing her own grandmother’s generation, who do not in fact represent contemporary China. The offense here is as much against a positive representation of China’s development, achieved at breakneck speed in the last few decades, as it is against a responsibility toward positivity.
It is certainly possible to empathise with these responses, especially when there are so many negative representations of China in the Western media. It may be, however, that in reaching out to a general Chinese public, in promoting the show in community newsletters and printing didactics in both Chinese and English, and in framing the show as Chinese we erred because the context of contemporary art is more international than national. Contemporary art is typically consumed by a specialist audience and is characterised by its critical content. To compare, for example, with Australian contemporary artists, the most successful of these are so-called ‘urban Aboriginal artists’ who specialise in criticisms of the Australian nation-state. Archie Moore was the most recent national representative at the Venice Biennale, for example, and made an installation with pages from coronary reports on Aboriginal deaths in custody. The most famous Chinese contemporary artist, Ai Wei Wei, is trenchantly critical of the Chinese state, but works internationally rather than nationally, his work part of an international circuit of contemporary art.
More surprising, then, was to have complaints from what Arts Hub described as ‘Chinese students’, and from at least one student studying contemporary art.[iii] One of the authors met this student, whom we presume was behind the complaints, in a talk he was giving to university art students. This is not the first time that Xiang and myself have caused offence among Chinese students studying in Australia. Two different posters promoting a study tour in China, one picturing Ai Wei Wei and another Xi Jinping, were taken down after overseas students complained to University authorities. In the Arts Hub essay, the contemporary art context for the exhibition was passed over as its authors reported that students had complained that the show ‘created an irresponsible representation of the country’ and promoted ‘narrow and unhelpful cultural stereotypes.’[iv] The critique is not inaccurate when viewed as part of a broader campaign against China in the West, but it is also a complete misrepresentation when Beijing Realism is seen as a part of contemporary art. For as recent defences of contemporary art have put it, artists create ‘ambiguous and complicated’ works that rely on ‘visual literacy.’[v] In the standard defence of contemporary art, its artists are not like Olympic athletes responsible for keeping up national appearances, but instead create intellectually demanding works that rely upon a level of education among their audiences.
Darren Jorgensen, Promotional poster for 2024 student tour to China which caused offence, featuring the likeness of Ai Wei Wei and Xi Jinping. 2024. Image courtesy of Darren Jorgensen.
It is, then, to this disjuncture between the national and post-national expectations of art that we can turn to begin to think about the way Chinese contemporary art functions overseas. The curator of White Rabbit Gallery, David Williams, emphasises the way that:
Sàng culture and the Tǎng Píng movement have of course emerged out of a specific Chinese cultural landscape. But the overarching sense of disillusionment, nihilism, and despondency fused with black humour that these movements represent can also speak to many cultures outside China.[vi]
Williams’s recent exhibition, XSWL, is geared to a Sydney audience who while not being familiar with Sàng and Tǎng Píng, can empathise with their aesthetics, or the aesthetics they have inspired among artists. However, Williams also emphasises the way in which the artists in his show use “cheerful facades” to both cover over and allude to the melancholia that they share. Beijing Realism had none of these facades, instead presenting photographic and video documentation of actual working class people, those left behind by China’s economic boom, to present melancholia rather than allude to it. Faced with this, Chinese-Australian audiences were unable to deny the subject of the show, which was China’s failures rather than its successes, historical specificity and realism rather than international aestheticism and contemporaneity.
[i] See Jo Pickup and Celina Lei, “Curators’ responsibilities in spotlight as Chinese audiences feel ‘let down,’” Arts Hub, 24 March, 2023, https://www.artshub.com.au/news/news/curators-responsibilities-chinese-audiences-perth-festival-2621803/; Sam Beard, “Being Realistic,” Dispatch, 7 April 2023, https://dispatchreview.info/Being-Realistic; and Darren Jorgensen and Tami Xiang, “Chinese art in Australia: Beijing Realism and the ethics of exhibition making,” Arts Hub, 12 April 2023, https://www.artshub.com.au/news/opinions-analysis/chinese-art-in-australia-beijing-realism-and-the-ethics-of-exhibition-making-2625850/.
[ii] Pickup and Lei, “Curator’s responsibilities.”
[iii] Pickup and Lei, “Curator’s responsibilities.”
[iv] Pickup and Lei, “Curator’s responsibilities.”
[v] Rex Butler and Daniel Browning speaking respectively in Butler, Browning and Paris Lettau, “An art historical approach to the work of Khaled Sabsabi,” The Art Show, ABC Radio National, 26 February, 2025, https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/the-art-show/an-art-historical-approach-to-the-work-of-khaled-sabsabi/104907792
[vi] Kye Fisher and David Williams, “Laughing to Death with David Williams: An Interview on White Rabbit Gallery’s ‘XSWL’,” Guan Kan: Thinking with Chinese Contemporary Art, 2 January 2025, https://www.guankanjournal.art/journalessays/8kqvt3md7s1g21agcm0cyiez0krxgo